Politics & Media

Feb 22, 2012, 08:47AM

Don't Blame Attack Ads For Today's Political Turmoil

It’s difficult, if not
impossible, to follow news of the presidential campaign this year without
reading or hearing the harrumphs of this or that pundit revising history and
claiming that America’s current politics are at new level of toxicity and a
danger to democracy. Part of this is because financially-strapped news
organizations are ramping up their political coverage since it’s cheap to
produce, but I suspect the main culprit for all this angst—I’ll lose my lunch
if I read one more lament about the lack of “grown-ups” in Washington—is that
the storyline leading up to Election Day isn’t very compelling. President Obama
vs. Mitt Romney? Boring. Obama vs. Rick Santorum? Just plain strange, and not
likely to be an all-night nail-biter on Nov. 6.

In addition, the ridiculous
amount of Republican candidate debates has made an already tortured process
that much more difficult to endure, especially for the “Republican
establishment” we keep hearing about, those “grown-ups” who, albeit
begrudgingly, simply want the Party to coalesce behind the supposedly more “electable”
Romney. I don’t happen to care much for Romney, Santorum, Newt Gingrich or gold
bug Ron Paul—Gov. Mitch Daniels or Sen. John Thune were my early favorites
before they decided not to run, and the inexplicably laid-back Jon Huntsman was
preferable to the survivors—but I’d prefer the hobo outside my office window to
Obama. The prospect of the President, unencumbered by reelection concerns is
frightening for anyone who fears a lost economic decade—or worse.

Nevertheless, I had a tough
time taking the normally erudite Peggy Noonan seriously last weekend upon
reading her Wall Street Journalcolumn that was a pox-on-both-houses denunciation of negative political
advertisements. I don’t really think Peggy’s gone off the rails, as this
particular column suggests; maybe she was just searching for a topic to write
about. And in fairness, Noonan is hardly alone in her opinion about attack ads—it’s
an evergreen of political journalism—but her piece was especially virulent, and
hyperbolic, on the alleged societal malady.

I’m aware that every four
years polling organizations release findings showing that Americans, by
overwhelming margins, simply hate attack ads, but I don’t believe the numbers.
Do you really think a person, contacted by, say, a Gallup representative, is
going to say, “Oh yeah, those anti-Romney ads are really entertaining!”

Noonan, who wrote an
excellent, prescient book about Hillary Clinton back in 2000, takes a tip from
the current Secretary of State’s lifelong syllabus, and does an “It’s about the
children” number on her readers. She writes:“Why are attack ads bad? Because at the end of the day
they are damaging to our country and its processes, and they are most damaging
to the degree their messages enter our children’s heads… [I]magine you are
today 8 or 10 or 12. You watch TV, you hear the radio in the car, you go on the
computer, you see the [attack] ads. They inundate you. And they make, in the
aggregate, an indelible impression: ‘They [politicians] are all bad.’… We are
poisoning their minds.

It’s Noonan’s fear that the
escalating number of attack ads will cause, a generation from now, a dearth of
men and women who choose a career in politics, “Because they want to grow up
and be admirable.” That makes little sense to me. For example, after Richard
Nixon’s Watergate-related crimes were revealed, not only did it result in a
rash of “political reformers” but also a rush to journalism schools, as many
wanted to be the next Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein. More significantly, the
urge to enter politics is a career choice that young people make—I doubt school
student governments have been disbanded in the wake of Washington’s negativity—just
as the law, medicine, media, technology and so on capture different
imaginations. A prediction: a decade from now, a number of the more serious
Occupy Wall Street protesters will run for office at both the local and
national level, and become part of the dreaded establishment.

Noonan concludes with the
mandatory spanking of political consultants and advertising men and women. She
admonishes them: “Are you thinking at all of the net effects of your dark work?
No? Then a curse upon you as you hit ‘save’ and ‘send.’ May your hand be
palsied. May it lose its power.”

Negative political ads are
so ubiquitous—just like the drug commercials that devote more of the 30-second
spots detailing the side effects of the product—that I think people just tune
them out. Besides, there are a lot worse things happening in the political
world than attack ads. Congressman, for instance, voting on bills they haven’t
read. Politicians like Gingrich making the crazy claim that Obama is this
country’s most radical president ever. Journalists, after hearing a juicy
tidbit from a friend of a friend of a Senator, immediately taking to Twitter to
share their “scoop.” Members of Congress obtaining sweetheart deals on, oh,
mortgages, or not paying their income taxes.

Noonan does acknowledge that inflammatory rhetoric in political campaigns
date back to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. The biannual
rash of attack ads is, to many people, obnoxious and
counter-productive, but they hardly augur the end of democracy.

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Discussion

What makes negative ads so easy this go-around is youtube. Politicians, by nature of their career choice, must change positions over time in order to stay current and in office. Like a pendulum, the U.S. swings left to right and back every 20 years or so. Therfore, any politician who has been in public for 10 or more years will appear contradictory and outside the mainstream ON VIDEO. (I don't think the pendulum will ever swing far enough right for Santorum) People like Paul, who haven't changed much are already written off for being outside the mainstream in the past and therefore have a difficult to impossible job of reclaiming the mainstream mantle.
On a different note, does it strike anyone else as strange that none of the repub candidates are leading their home state polls?

Don't recognize the photo, but it seems, uh, ill considered. I think the Prez is trying (exerting effort versus making me impatient, well, maybe both) but he wins because the Whigs can't come up with a strong candidate - again.

people tune negative ads and drug commercials out but they still seep into our consciousness whether we like it or not. I don't think it's the source of our problems, it's a symptom. Negative attack ads are extremely effective anyway, and will continued to be used until they lose their efficacy.